Instagram censorship

If you’re not up to an angry rant, you might want to navigate away from this page!

So I just happened to notice a rant by a fellow blogger (Thanks MacPsych!) that he posted the night before Tumblr enforced their nudity ban – though I didn’t happen to notice his post until the night after Tumblr enforced their nudity ban – with a generous 14 days warning, I might add. I was clearly asleep at the wheel

I’m presently staying at Peace Blue Naturist Resort on Phuket, Thailand. My morning ritual involves walking about one kilometer to either Rawai or Naiharn beach, then strolling along with sea wondering to myself, “Why the hell are rules regarding nudity so incredibly rigid here!?” This also leads me into a series of mind-games where I start paying closer attention to the attire of the people I pass along the way. In this part of the country, some are wrapped in enough clothing for the coldest of days in Chicago, while others could be the poster child for the definition of scantily clad – in that way that draws your attention to particular physical attributes. (I won’t even bother to digress into the remarkable attributes of the Speedo and German men.)

But as I was making my way back, the simplest of facts occurred to me! I’ve traveled to nearly fifty countries on six continents where I have spent time – on each of these continents – with naked people and people wearing cloths. NEWS FLASH: With very few exceptions, they ALL look just about the same, with one set of accoutrements or the other.

While this is a country mile from anything close to rocket science, what I don’t understand is why Tumblr not only decided to follow suit with Facebook and Instagram regarding policies on nudity, but seems to have carved an even wider swath than their prudish media counterparts. For me, Tumblr was something of a Naturist Clearing House… I followed blogs that focused on real naturist photography, avoiding those that had a voyeuristic edge, and simply blocking the ones that were overtly sexual. (I don’t actually have a problem with sexual imagery, I just didn’t want it cluttering up the message of my naturist blog!) But most importantly, when I found a photo that I thought portrayed naturism in a particularly positive or holistic light, I’d reblog it as if to say, “See! This is what naturism is really about! Simply being naked in the woods, or at a lake, or with friends and family at the beach.”

But I was too late. By the time I got to my my Tumblr site, it had been ravaged into ruins by the Tumblr bots, tagging or removing at least 90% of the photos I had amassed there over the years, many of which were directly from my own blog posts, like this one.

Here’s the real kicker though! To create this blog post, I performed a series of Google image searches, all of which included the word nudist, naturist, or even known naturist destinations like those in Croatia and France. In an effort to demonstrate some sense of diversity, so that we might take note of the fact that black, Asian, Indian, Middle Eastern and Europeans all have the same body parts, but simply in varied proportions. But as I conducted my search, Mr. Google pulled down copious amounts of some of the randiest, raunchiest pornography I have ever seen. In fact, it took me forever to find the eighteen images included in this post amidst literally thousands of images ranging from the mildly provocative, to people doing things I had never even dreamed of before! (And I have a pretty vivid imagination.)

So nice work Tumblr. (And you too Instagram and Facebook – though you should know, Mr. Zuckerberg, there are quite a few hot sex clips slipping through your web-bots right onto my news-feed while you’re busy putting me and my naturist friends in FB jail. You just might want to look into that.) In one foul swoop, Tumblr wiped out galleries of real naturist images that people have been collecting and sharing for years. Yeah, I know, supposedly there’s a tool that allows you to go back and recapture those, but I’ll go ahead an pull down the shredded remnants remnant of my Tumblr blog, as I’m sure most others already have. No need to clutter up all that web space with naked people playing volleyball, laying in the sand, and swimming in the sea when those gigabytes could be much better appropriated to legitimate porn sites, many of which I inadvertently visited today while they were hiding behind photos of people walking on a nude beach.

Good lord, social media, what’s next? Maybe you should concentrate on something that matters, liking bringing down the American government by broadly distributing fake news in an effort to eat away at the pillars of democracy. Amazing that you have time to handle all that, while enforcing exposed nipple laws at the same time!